When she was 90, June Stock decided she shouldn't wait any longer to craft a long-overdue homage to her parents — a love letter that took three years to write.

In mid-November, she'll publish "The Twenty-Five Cent Gamble," the true story of how her father's vision and her mother's audacity turned a great idea into an industry that changed the face of education in the United States and the world.

Stock is the recently widowed wife of Morgan Stock, founder of the Monterey Peninsula College drama department, who died Aug. 28 at his Pebble Beach home at age 93.

"I was born in June of 1919. Morgan was born in July. So I was always 'the older woman' in his life," she says with a laugh.

She is the daughter of educator Willis W. Clark, who in the 1920s looked at the way school children were being tested and graded, developed a more efficient method and, thanks to the initiative of his wife, Ethel, created what eventually became known as the California Testing Bureau (CTB).

True story

June Stock's book is the true story of how Ethel Clark wrangled the rights to her husband's creation from the Los Angeles school district, then sent out 25 penny postcards advertising the concept to districts all over the U.S. A year later, the Kansas City school district signed on as the first client in an industry that now serves more than 18 million students in 50 states and 49 countries.

The family moved CTB from Southern California to Monterey in the early 1960s, and it was purchased in 1965 by McGraw-Hill Companies, which still operates today from Ryan Ranch.

"I was with the company from the very first day. I was probably about 5 years old when I started licking stamps for my mother," Stock recalls. "At one time or another I probably did every job in the company. During (World War II), we were so short-handed that I was the order-taker, the stock clerk, the shipping and receiving manager, the billing person ... and I learned an awful lot about tests."

Stock describes her father as "a unique combination of sociologist, statistician and educator, and a very compassionate person who was driven to be sure students always got a fair shake on test results."

Willis Clark

Willis Clark was teaching at a school for delinquent boys in an era when every test was administered individually and graded by hand. He saw a need to create an efficient method of group testing, along with a way to grade those tests quickly.

"At some point, my parents decided that a school for delinquent boys might not be the best place to raise a baby girl, so he moved on to the L.A. public schools, where he developed a test series called the Los Angeles Fundamentals," Stock says.

Ethel Clark was a graduate of secretarial school who worked as a typist, transcribing theses and dissertations for graduate students at the University of Southern California.

"She was restless as heck being a mother and housewife, and somehow got the idea that if she could obtain the rights from the school district, and print the test, they could sell it to other districts," Stock says. "That's how it all started."

Stock's memoir chronicles the ascent of a small company that blossomed through hard work and innovation, while maintaining a fun, family atmosphere that was an extension of her parents' personalities.

Fond memories

Social interaction was a big part of the company. Stock remembers portraying a Persian princess and singing a song (to which she still remembers the words) during "The Clark Follies," the company's annual Christmas pageant, which would challenge each department of the company to come up with the most entertaining skit.

She also has fond memories of the regular parties her parents threw for employees, when the liquor flowed and the traditional late-night game was to see who could tell the dirtiest story. Her mother, she says, was particularly formidable at that.

"My mother was almost indescribable. She was ... well, flamboyant is the word people usually come up with," Stock says. "She didn't go by the rules. She was very farsighted with the things she did — things that turned out to be winners.

"And my father ... The poor guy would come home from work, and he'd be working at night on his doctorate. At the same time, he was constantly trying to answer some very technical questions for the company, because at that point he was the only one who knew the answers."

Stock recalls being the guinea pig for many of her parents' tests, answering a zillion test question, filling in endless rows with black dots. Willis Clark negotiated a deal to trade his testing methods for tuition for his daughter at an exclusive private school.

Graduated at 15

"The classes were very small and we got individual attention," Stock says. "There were only three of us in my eighth-grade graduating class: Clifford Heinz (of Heinz pickles, ketchup, etc..), Karen Oakie (daughter of actor Jack Oakie) and me."

Her education was so efficient that she graduated from high school and enrolled at Santa Monica City College at age 15 with aspirations of becoming a research surgeon. She was pursuing that goal, taking a pre-med class at UCLA, when she encountered Frank Duran.

"I met him at a cocktail party and we were attracted to each other," she says. "Frank was kind of a daredevil and a gambler — a very flashy kind of guy."

They were married in 1940 and had two children: Timothy, now an entrepreneur in the San Jose area, and Patricia, assistant to the president of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Duran parlayed an auto-body business into a burgeoning rental car company, which he brought north when Stock's family moved CTB to Monterey.

"He had a Beechcraft Bonanza (aircraft) that he dearly loved, and he really enjoyed flying to Las Vegas or up to Golden Gate Park to gamble. He was a very fun, exciting guy," she says.

But the plane crashed just short of the runway at Monterey Peninsula Airport in 1986 and he was killed.

Meeting Stock

Three years later, she was introduced to recently widowed Morgan Stock by mutual friends Sam and Edie Karas.

"They invited me to a buffet lunch with a bunch of other people. I didn't pay much attention to him, and I actually thought he was Morgan Flagg, who had a big foundation on the Peninsula," she remembers with a laugh. "I kept asking, 'So, how's the Flagg foundation going?'"

This Morgan was a local icon among the theater crowd. One night he invited her to a movie that included one of his former students in the cast. Afterward, he asked for another date.

"I was thinking, 'Gee, I don't know ... I don't even really know this guy,'" she recalls. "I said, 'Give me a call in a couple of weeks,' and he said, 'I can't wait that long.' That's what did it for me. I didn't want to keep him waiting. So we met in January or February of 1989, and we got married in December."

She describes her second husband as "the perennial optimist. Morgan loved everybody, and everybody loved Morgan.

"All of my years with him were good years," she says. "We traveled a lot. We laughed a lot. He was just a very, very good guy."

She credits close friends Brian and Laura Dadiw for help with editing, marketing and technical assistance on "The Twenty-Five Cent Gamble," which will become available in mid-November through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, e-readers and other outlets. June Stock has tentative plans to begin writing another book soon.